Colonial America Quotes

“Mingo went toward his cabin, but turning at the door, he looked back at George. “Hear me, boy! You thinks you’s sump’n special wid massa, but nothin’ don’t make no difference to mad, scared white folks! Don’t you be no fool an’ slip off nowhere till this blow over, you hear me? I mean don’t!”
― Alex Haley, Roots: The Saga of an American Family

“The way to Heaven is ascending; we must be content to travel uphill, though it be hard and tiresome, and contrary to the natural bias of our flesh.”
― Jonathan Edwards

“I am an aristocrat: I love liberty, I hate equality.”
― John Randolph

“In the comfortingly distorted view of the past, American slavery came about in the passive sense. That's just the way things were back then. Slavery was an inherited reality, a long-standing if unsavory fact of trade and war. In reality, colonial legislatures consciously conceived American chattel slavery at the turn of the eighteenth century, and they spelled out its terms in painstaking regulatory detail. Virginia's slave codes contained forty-one sections and more than four thousand words.

...

The slave codes of 1705 are among American history's most striking evidence that our nation's greatest sins were achieved with clear forethought and determined maintenance.”
― Kai Wright, Four Hundred Souls: A Community History of African America, 1619-2019

“It is difficult to picture the rich, hard-nosed advisors of James I being overly concerned about the rights of vagabonds and felons. But this was a period that was especially suspicious of arbitrary acts by the Crown against individuals. There was no law enabling the crown to exile anyone, including the baser convict, into forced labour. According to legal scholars, the Magna Carta itself protected even them. The Privy Councillors therefore dressed up what was to befall the convicts and presented the decree authorising their transportation as an act of royal mercy. The convicts were to be reprieved from death in exchange for accepting transportation. (71-71)”
― Don Jordan, White Cargo: The Forgotten History of Britain’s White Slaves in America

“Unlike others before him, Oglethorpe felt the disadvantaged could be reclaimed if they were given a fair chance.”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“Annie's message is timeless, her shining spirit and healing gift from the Spiritual Universe will capture your heart. She was born with birth defects in a time when special children and their mothers were put to death or banished. But have things changed really that much? Have they changed enough? "No!" Bullying, abuse, ridicule, and inequality thrives in the lives of women and children in our global modern society, just as surely as it did in the mid-1600s Colonial America. Based on factual research.”
― Deborah A.Bowman

“[Enoch Root] hadn't really known what to expect of America. But people here seem to do things—hangings included—with a blunt, blank efficiency that's admirable and disappointing at the same time. Like jumping fish, they go about difficult matters with bloodless ease. As if they were all born knowing things that other people must absorb, along with faery-tales and superstitions, from their families and villages. Maybe it is because most of them came over on ships.
(Boston Common, October 12, 1713, 10:33:52 a.m.)”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“p. 39 Rum, in fact, was the unspoken demon in most negotiations and failed treaties with the Delaware nation. That evil influence has been largely expunged from histories. Access to rum, or its prohibition, assured or canceled oaths and pacts no sooner than they were sworn.”
― Daniel Mark Epstein, The Loyal Son: The War in Ben Franklin's House

“In the vastness of the United States of America, the island nation Britain found the perfect vessel into which to pour its continental-sized hubris and ambition.”
― Stewart Stafford

“Colonial America had looked upon (lawyers) as mere tradesmen who earned a questionable living by cleverness and chicanery.”
― Catherine Drinker Bowen, Yankee from Olympus: Justice Holmes and His Family

“Nobody in Colonial America, to be sure, believed that society owed every child the ultimate in education, but intelligence, industry, and thrift combined with ambition got many a poor man's son into the colonial colleges.”
― Louis B. Wright

“More than any other colonial founder, Oglethorpe made himself one of the people, promoting collective effort.”
― Nancy Isenberg, White Trash: The 400-Year Untold History of Class in America

“….In time, the Europeans brought in pigs and horses, both of which were allowed to run wild and multiply. Pigs in the wild soon became aggressive feral boars with tusks, eating everything in sight. Corn, which the Indians depended upon, was attacked and uprooted by the pigs before maturing, thus leaving the Indians without an important source of nourishment. Although pigs provided a necessary source of protein, they were also known to host worms and parasites, and spread viruses such as influenza. If undercooked, the meat could cause trichinosis infections that, depending upon the severity, could result in death in four to six weeks.
The sailors returning to Europe brought with them tobacco and syphilis, both of which could be fatal. Syphilis is the gift that keeps on giving and soon spread throughout Europe and England. Unknown prior to the discovery of America, it became another blight on the European continent.
Because of their close connection, many people were convinced that pigs were the carriers of Syphilis. Perhaps they were right….
.”
― Captain Hank Bracker, Suppressed I Rise

“The mysterious Enoch Root meets 8-year-old Benjamin Franklin, Boston, 1713:
"Do I look like a schoolmaster to you?"
"No, but you talk like one."
"You know something of schoolmasters, do you?"
"Yes, sir," the boy says, faltering a bit as he sees the jaws of the trap swinging toward his leg.
"Yet here it is the middle of Monday—"
"The place was empty 'cause of the Hanging. I didn't want to stay and—"
"And what?"
"Get more ahead of the others than I was already."
"If you are ahead, the correct thing is to get used to it—not to make yourself into an imbecile. Come, you belong in school.”
― Neal Stephenson, Quicksilver

“The royalists paroled from the Channel Islands who chose Virginia, Philip Ludwell and Francis Lovelace among them, became Sir William Berkeley's courtiers. They never lost the habit, so appropriate to exiles, of pledging loyalty to the king but looking out for themselves.”
― Stephen Saunders Webb, 1676: The End of American Independence

“It's a good thing he doesn't know how little my honor concerning the crown amounts to, otherwise he really never would agree.”
― Jeannette Dilouie, Maiden America

“The usual method for starting a fire in colonial America was to strike flint against steel. the usual way to protest an injustice was to bring a suit to the colonial courts.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation

“Within a day Mercy heard the news. She never forgot it. A few months later, that riot became the backdrop for her first political satire.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation

“...a later scene...was perhaps Mercy's strongest indictment of the colonial disregard for women and families.”
― Nancy Rubin Stuart, The Muse of the Revolution: The Secret Pen of Mercy Otis Warren and the Founding of a Nation

“However, neither process nor project will go as smoothly as the colonists hope… at some deeper (mostly unacknowledged) level, there will be growing worry that the process might reverse itself—so as to make the currents of change run the opposite way. Instead of their civilizing the wilderness (and its savage inhabitants), the wilderness might change, might uncivilize, them. This they will feel an appalling prospect, a nightmare to resist and suppress by every means possible.”
― John Putnam Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America

“This, indeed, goes far toward explaining the extraordinary popularity of captivity narratives, from the last quarter of the seventeenth century to the beginning of the twentieth. Generation after generation of readers turned to such writings with a special—and intense—curiosity. What was it like for you, on the other side of the frontier? How much, and in what ways, were you changed? Were the changes personally compromising? Did you accept them willingly, or even seek them out? Can we trust you now?”
― John Putnam Demos, The Unredeemed Captive: A Family Story from Early America

“Adiós, mi compañero. Mi casa, mi nombre de animal. Adiós piel de venado con su olor, el pelo acostumbrado a su postura y el hueco de su abrazo. Adiós mi sujetado corazón a la única frontera que es la vida. Adiós a la multitud en uno solo. La única parte en que me pueden herir donde me duela. Adiós mi lengua, un tono que tuve al alabarte. Adiós a tu modo agazapado de caer. No puede uno morder su soledad sino como alacrán que se envenena”
― Susana Villalba

“In 1641, Massachusetts became the first colony to recognize slavery as a legal institution. By the mid-1600s, slavery was evolving into a race-based institution: the enslaved were identified by the color of their skin.”
― Linda Tarrant-Reid, Discovering Black America: From the Age of Exploration to the Twenty-First Century

“Phillis Wheatley, a young slave girl, published a collection of poems titled 'Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral' in 1773, when she was around twenty years old, becoming the first enslaved African in America to publish a book of poetry.”
― Linda Tarrant-Reid, Discovering Black America: From the Age of Exploration to the Twenty-First Century

“Religion has always been an important staple in African American culture. During slavery, Africans were forbidden from practicing their own spiritual beliefs brought with them from Africa. It was against the law, in most of the colonies, for blacks to gather in groups larger than three. As a result, they were not allowed to form their own churches. The enslaved had to worship with their masters at their churches or secretly, in out-of-the-way meeting places.

Religion was one of the ways slaveholders kept the enslaved in bondage. Slaveholders converted thousands of enslaved Africans to Christianity, with the belief that they were saving people they considered "inferior," and they often cited the Bible to validate this idea. They also used the fear of God to enforce a slave's obedience.”
― Linda Tarrant-Reid, Discovering Black America: From the Age of Exploration to the Twenty-First Century

“During the American Revolution, the British offered emancipation to any enslaved person who fought on their side. This military tactic infuriated the Patriots and caused pandemonium on the southern plantations as thousands of slaves escaped and joined the British Army or sought refuge behind enemy lines.”
― Linda Tarrant-Reid, Discovering Black America: From the Age of Exploration to the Twenty-First Century

“Jack and Jill (Colonial Sonnet)

Jack and Jill once went up a hill,
to pick the fabled golden fruit.
So they trapped some blacks-n-browns,
to serve them tireless hand and foot.

Jack and Jill had a glorious dream,
to make the world imperially great.
So they bought some colored folks,
to boss around from their noble bed.

Jack and Jill were full of themselves,
they nicked 'n nicked without repercussion.
Like shameless filth then they sold tickets,
exhibiting the spoils of their barbarism.

Jack and Jill were textbook white trash,
not the right idols of civilized society.
You cannot unscrew their diabolical screwups,
just have the decency to not repeat history.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“Yankee Dongle (Pilgrim Sonnet)

Yankee dongle crossed the pond,
sailing on a ship called Mayflower.
He plucked and tucked a feather in cap,
and called himself the lone ranger.

Yankee dongle made many westerns,
to maintain the narrative in favor.
Propaganda is a key apparatus,
when you're out to roam as killers.

Yankee dongle ran away from home,
he had trouble with his tyrant father.
So he sought out a land of his own,
where he was the new face of terror.

Yankee dongle is his father's son,
same vision, but 100 times the cunning.
Thus, while his father is losing grip,
pilgrim spirit continues transgressing.”
― Abhijit Naskar, Brit Actually: Nursery Rhymes of Reparations

“The groundswell of outrage over the invasion of Iraq often cited the preemptive war as a betrayal of American ideals. The subtext of the dissent was: This is not who we are. But not if you were standing where I was. It was hard to see the look in that palace tour guide's eyes when she talked about the American flag flying over the palace and not realize that ever since 1898, from time to time, this is exactly who we are.”
― Sarah Vowell, Unfamiliar Fishes